Concatenating multiple columns across rows

Today I ran into an interesting question on the forums at SQLServerCentral and I decided to share the solution I provided, because it was fun to code and, hopefully, useful for some of you.

Many experienced T-SQL coders make use of FOR XML PATH(‘’) to build concatenated strings from multiple rows. It’s a nice technique and pretty simple to use.
For instance, if you want to create a list of databases in a single concatenated string, you can run this statement:

SELECT CAST((
SELECT name + ',' AS [text()]
FROM sys.databases
ORDER BY name
FOR XML PATH('')
) AS varchar(max))

The setup code creates two tables: Sentences and Rows. The first one is the master table, that contains the sentence_id and a description. The second one contains the actual sentences, broken into rows and organized with languages in columns.

For the purposes of this test, I inserted in the Rows table an excerpt of Cicero’s “De Finibus bonorum et malorum”, also known as “Lorem Ipsum”, the printing and typesetting industry’s standard dummy text since the 1500s.

Here’s how the input data looks like:

What we want to do is concatenate all the rows for each sentence, keeping the languages separated. It could be accomplished very easily concatenating each column separately in a subquery, but what if the input data comes from a rather expensive query? You don’t want to run the statement for each language, do you?